This column originally was published in the Herald-American on Aug. 25, 1991. It is one of 10 columns Dick Case picked as his favorites.

Mike Virkler and I took the main haul into Watson East Triangle of Herkimer County a couple of weeks ago. Mike at the wheel of his four-wheel drive Sierra with a chaw of tobacco in his cheek and a monologue about The Adirondacks and conservationism on his lips.

He wanted me to see his camp at Buck Lake. He’s not sure how long it’s going to be there.

Mike’s 85. He started coming to this remote logging tract north of Lowville 63 years ago. He’s hunted it, fished it, guided it and admired it ever since.

Just now he owns a quandary that’s one acre of the bigger picture of The Adirondacks. The camp Mike and his wife, Hilda, put on a bluff at Buck Lake 29 years ago is at the edge of the argument between New Yorkers who want to preserve our great wilderness and those who want to use it.

The Virklers live in Castorland, 32 miles and 2 1/2 hours of mostly logging road from Buck Lake. Mike walked into Watson East to hunt as a young man. Then he joined a hunt club in the triangle. A dozen years later, in the early 1960s, he left the club and built the cabin of his dreams on an acre of land he rented from International Paper Co., which had cut timber in these woods since the 1880s.

Mike said he figured the lot would be his as long as he paid the rent. He didn’t figure on taxes going up and logging going out.

Five years ago, the company sold 16,700 acres of Watson East to the state, to add to the forest preserve. At the time, its real estate division told the Watson East club members the tract had to be sold as a single piece and a buyer couldn’t be found.

The hunting camps — there are 11 besides Mike’s Buck Lake Club — could stay until Sept. 10, 1991. After that, the area’s part of the Oswegatchie Great Forest preserve.

State law on forest preserves is followed here. The tenants have to “restore the land to a condition satisfactory to” International Paper and the state. That condition, under the company’s sale agreement, means removal of man-made structures from the tract.

Including the one made by this man, Mike Virkler.

Most of the clubs in the triangle plan to close their camps and walk away. “Let the state burn ’em, “ Jim Duflo of Kelly Hills Club said to me last week.

Mike has an offer from the Department of Environmental Conservation which might preserve the place. Last week, he said he thinks the offer’s too late.

Mike started us toward the camp with a drive through his tree farm, 191 acres developed by Mike and his father since 1916. He’s still cutting pines in the plantation, although not by himself, the way he used to. He also ran a coal and fuel oil business in Castorland for 30 years.

There have been Virklers in this part of Lewis County since the 1830s. Mike drove and talked about them as we ate the egg and olive sandwiches Hilda packed us. He didn’t bother to hide the fact he’s proud of his roots, the ones in his family and in his woodlands.

He pointed out the way his roadways run straight among the lines of trees. How the wildflowers and game coexist with his crop. How straight and tall some of those pines grow.

“I wanted you to see this in contrast to what we’ll see later in the forest preserve, “ he explained.

Mike said he hoped I wouldn’t pin a quick label to him. If I had to, what would it be?

“How about conservationist, “ he replied, “someone who believes in the wise use of natural resources. I never called myself an environmentalist. That’s a fashionable, misused word. I call those people the ’environmental evangelists.’ They’re public relations people with millions of dollars to spend.”

Mike, I guessed, is an independent Yankee from New York who wants to live without evangelism and government touching his life.

We stopped at Croghan Meat Market for sausage and a roll of the famous bologna sausage that’s made there. Outside of the hamlet of Belfort, Mike mentioned that the Yanceys — pronounced “Yoncey” — are Hilda’s family. They helped him build the cabin.

We talked about glacial rocks, sugar bushes and eskers, the sand ridges snaking through the Adirondack mountains. The Virklers’ camp sits on an esker. When I noticed my host’s knowledge of geology, I got him to admit he’d studied the subject in college, along with Romance languages and German.

Mike is Class of 1923, Hamilton College.

He put his German to use as an Army officer in World War II for six years. He was assigned to German POW camps in the United States. He also studied at Heidelberg during a tour of Europe after college and at McGill, in Canada.

“Outside of that, “ Mike said, lighting his corncob pipe, “I’m more or less illiterate.”

The terrain under the Sierra got steeper, narrower and guttier as we closed in on the camp. We traveled the main haul, the trail cut for loggers with horses 100 years ago. Between 1927 and 1986, Mike and his brother-in-law, Joe Yancey, guided hunters in with a team of horses hauling a wagon.

When we passed into Herkimer County, he announced: “This is the wilderness, by bureaucratic decree. The state buys it, and it becomes wilderness. They take the best and leave the rest.”

The man knows the woods. Mike’s like a topographic map that talks and tells stories about the ponds, forks in the road and landings where the lumbermen piled their logs.

We passed a landing where Wendell Still had the last logging camp. I noticed piles of rotting timber, a rusty snowplow and the hollow frame of a cabin.

“Some of this is worse than the Belleau Woods I saw when I was in Europe after World War I, “ he said. Mike doesn’t think the state is a worthy caretaker of the wildernesses it buys. He thinks it’s foolish to covet more.

I’d heard the same sentiment when I talked about Watson East with Jim Duflo, another of the old-time hunting campers. Jim sells real estate in Lowville and knows the wilderness marketplace.

“It’s a pity the state has to do with they do, “ Jim said. “It’s because of the do-gooders in the Sierra and Audubon clubs. What they try to do is admirable, but it’s at someone else’s expense. The state owns 3 million acres now, and they can’t take care of it.”

Jim explained how International Paper at first tried to sell all of the 16,000 acres in the triangle to the hunt clubs at a high price, then in parcels of a few thousands acres, which still weren’t affordable.

The company formed a real estate division and cut a deal with the state for the land in 1986.

“We had no choice, take the lease or leave it, “ Mike recalled. “It was a ripoff by the paper company with the approval of DEC. In a way, I blame the governor for pushing the purchase of the triangle. He’s only hearing what the loudmouth environmental evangelists say to him, and he thinks that’s the thing to do. I’d like to bring him up here for the night.”

One of the sights Mike would point out to Mario Cuomo would be piles of tree cuttings along the road, which are marked with pink flags since DEC took over as forest manager. In the old days, such brush would be left to return to nature in the woods; now it’s supposed to be hauled out, so not to disfigure the wilderness.

We passed A pink blaze, and Mike said to me, “Nice spot for a condo, don’t you think? I’m sure some developer will want to put one up here. Sure. There’s no scenery to speak of, and the fishing’s no good any more.”

Mike continued, “Fish pirates ruined it. They take out fish for an entire year during the first week of fishing. I volunteered to manage Buck Lake to bring back the trout, but the DEC wouldn’t let me.

“And the road-running poachers are killing the deer all season with impunity. The game protector up here retired, and they didn’t replace him.”

We watched a young buck cross in front of us.

“You know, I compare the state buying the triangle to communism. They’re eliminating private enterprise and initiative. They’re taking the camps away from people who’ve been paying their way over the years and turning it over to the public, the proletariat, for free. With about the same results we’ve seen with communism.”

I said to Mike somebody’s going to think you hunters just want to have the wilderness to yourselves. He shook his head.

“They’ve got all the playground they need for the recreationists. You know the public has trashed a lot of the wilderness by overuse. And as a youth, I did a lot of climbing myself. I think the DEC is trying to steer them over here, but they’re not interested.”

When we got to the trail head into camp, Mike spotted truck tracks in the dirt. The puddles were muddy. Someone’s in there. He’s sensitive to visitors because vandalism has increased at the camps in the last five years. That’s one reason Mike strapped on a gun belt with his .357 Magnum before we left Castorland.

No trouble today, though. The visitor was a welcome one, the mayor of Castorland.

The mayor’s Mike’s pal, Rich Widrick. Rich worked on the camp. They pitched tents on the bluff during the two summers it took them to finish the main building and woodshed.

Rich had A fire in the big stone fireplace Mike put up using some of his geologic wonders. Smoke curled from the chimney. There was a fire in the stove, too. Rich is camp cook; he had venison bourguignon stewing in a black frying pan.

We smiled and went inside Mike’s cabin. We were wet from the rain and tired from the trip to 1,800-foot elevation and the headwaters of the West Branch of the Oswegatchie River.

The cabin’s one big room with windows to the pond, which the Virklers renamed a lake “because it doesn’t sound so slimy, “ according to Mike. The log walls are tongue-and-groove construction. Mike and his helpers cut them with chain saws and made them snug without using chink.

The roof’s of quartersawn white-pine shingles. Not a nail in there, nor anywhere else; gravity and pegs do the trick.

Mike and Hilda’s place is a wonder of convenience and built-ins. There’s even a homemade mouse trap under the sink. A tin can is stretched over a pail of water on a string. The can is coated with peanut butter.

Rich, Mike and I sat at the table and feasted on Rich’s stew and potatoes and a salad Mike mixed as we talked. All the ingredients but the lettuce are stowed on a shelf under the table, which was built by Mike from a 250-year-old windblown hard maple. Some of the spices were in the burl bowls Mike carves in the winter at home.

It was quiet, real quiet, except for wind shivering the bear fence on the outside walls. Dark, too.

“There ain’t nothing out there but what’s out there, “ Rich said solemnly.

I didn’t need to ask my companions why they like Buck Lake so much. But I did anyway.

“I come here to relax, “ Mike said.

Rich nodded.

We poured coffee from the pot steaming on the stove. Mike sat so the flames in the grate lighted him from behind. He looked down at some notes he’d made and then he told me about what the DEC visitors proposed when they visited the cabin the week before.

Later I heard the ideas from one of the visitors, Tom Brown of Watertown, DEC administrator for the region.

“We think this is a really exceptional piece of skilled carpentry and craftsmanship, “ Tom explained. “The purpose of our meeting with Mike was to discuss some more practical uses of the camp. We wanted to find out what he wanted to do.”

No, he said, DEC had no intention of destroying it Sept. 10.

A classification process will take about two years after the state has title. This involves recommendations by the Adirondack Park Agency and DEC to the governor as to whether Watson East is to be “wild forest” or “wilderness.”

If it is to be wild forest, Tom said the cabin might be preserved, possibly as a shelter for hikers and campers or an interim ranger station. If it’s a wilderness it’s to be, without a trace of Mike or any other man, then Tom would like to explore the idea of moving the camp to the Adirondack Museum at Blue Mountain Lake.

Tom explained he hadn’t approached the museum because he hadn’t heard from Mike. If the Buck Lake Club members decide to walk away from the cabin, Tom said the other uses still could be pursued.

That night at Buck Lake Mike told me he appreciated Tom’s consideration “even though it wasn’t possible to come up with anything acceptable to us, or them, I guess.”

He said he didn’t think the cabin can be moved, because of its construction. He also didn’t like the notion, offered by Tom, of staying on after the 10th as a caretaker. Independent woodsman that he is, they’re not going to put Mike Virkler on any state payroll.

The main thing, though, was that he didn’t think the cabin’s going to be there very long after he and Hilda pack the truck and move down the road for the last time.

“It’s a toss-up, “ Mike said, “who will trash it first, the vandals or the bears.”

The next morning we woke up to the smell of Rich’s eggs, coffee and johnnycake corn bread. I walked around in the mists taking pictures, and Mike washed in a bowl heated on the stove. Then he fed the three Canada jays who eat out of his hand from the front porch.

I called Mike the next week to see if he’d made up his mind.

“We had another break-in at the camp the week after you were up there, “ he said. “They took some handicrafts and antiques and deflated the tires on the ATV and tote wagon. They stole my rain gauge. That ends 26 years of keeping records for the DEC and Geological Survey.”

Mike sounded as if he wanted to cry.

“I think that’s proof New York state already has more than it can handle. If the cabin’s still there after the 10th, those people are going to burn it. They want what we’ve built up. And if I’m there, they’re afraid they’ll be reported for doing something illegal.”

When I asked, Mike said he thought he knew his enemies. He thinks they resent him because of how he’s reported their illegal activities in Watson East. So, he and Hilda took most of their belongings with them to Castorland when they broke camp last Sunday.